Donald Trump and maga Republicans including Senator Susan Collins must stand up for American health care!

Trump’s Harmful Policies Are Endangering Your Health

Editorial opinion published in The New York Times

Donald Trump turned Make America Healthy Again into one of his administration’s signature promises. It is a laudable goal, too. By several measures, the United States is the world’s least healthy high-income country.

Nevertheless, as is so often the case with Trump, he both identified a real problem and enacted a set of policies that will worsen that problem. With public health, the damage could be vast. His administration is rejecting basic medical knowledge and turning back the clock to an era when people were sicker and died sooner.

The administration’s hostility to lifesaving vaccines, led by the incompetent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has already contributed to a rise in measles.  Trump’s cuts to scientific research will forestall future treatments of cancer, heart disease and childhood illnesses. His cuts to Medicaid, which pay for tax breaks for the wealthy, will leave millions of Americans without health insurance and, by extension, health care. His rollback of environmental regulations has allowed corporations to pump more pollution into the air and water, which will contribute to lung diseases and other ailments.

As disappointing as the pre-Trump trends in public health were, Americans remain far healthier than in previous generations. Life expectancy today is almost 80, up from less than 60 a century ago. In that century, we have conquered smallpox and polio. We have cleaned our cities of the smog that was once normal. We have made progress against cancers and cardiovascular diseases that once were death sentences. Trump and Kennedy are dismantling the eight decades of work that made that progress possible. There is a great deal to lose.

Here’s what they are doing to harm our health:

1. Exposing Americans to preventable diseases: The taming of infectious diseases, including polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, tetanus, influenza and, most recently, Covid-19, has been one of humankind’s greatest achievements. These diseases have all been made far less deadly, and in some cases virtually nonexistent, thanks to vaccines. Mr. Trump himself recently said that vaccines work, “pure and simple.”

Yet as his top health official he has appointed a conspiracist, Mr. Kennedy, who exaggerates or outright lies about the risks that come with these vaccines. Mr. Kennedy has filled an important federal panel, which shapes which vaccines are covered by insurers, with other conspiracists. Republican-led states are following the administration’s lead; Florida is trying to repeal vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.

These misguided changes are already having an effect. The Covid vaccine has become harder to get, even for some vulnerable people. Childhood vaccination rates, which were falling before Mr. Trump returned to office, seem likely to fall further as Mr. Kennedy fans parents’ fears. Already, measles outbreaks have occurred in Texas and elsewhere, and the effects may be far worse in the coming years as society risks losing the herd immunity that it had achieved.

We know about the consequences from these diseases because humanity has lived them. Before vaccines, illnesses like smallpox, measles and polio left people scarred, paralyzed, blind or dead. Many of the victims were children. The Trump administration is condemning more people to suffer and die from diseases that we know how to prevent.

2. Making a future pandemic more deadly: Nobody knows when the next pandemic will arrive. Whenever it does, the United States may be even less prepared than it was for Covid.


With Elon Musk’s help, Trump this year dismantled the United States Agency for International Development. He also withdrew from the World Health Organization, the global hub for tracking health emergencies, and emptied the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response. These moves may have their biggest effects on poor citizens of other countries who previously benefited from American aid, but they put Americans at risk, too.

Trump fired the experts and community health workers who once monitored the world for outbreaks and helped restrain those outbreaks before they spread. In the past few decades alone, these workers led the fight against SARS, Zika, Ebola, bird flu and other illnesses, and Americans were largely spared from their effects.

Perhaps the strangest part of Trump’s health policy is his turn against mRNA vaccines. In his first term, his administration helped make possible the stunningly rapid development of mRNA vaccines for Covid. Trump could claim mRNA as his greatest accomplishment. Instead, he caved to vaccine skeptics within the MAGA movement and canceled $500 million in contracts to develop future mRNA vaccines.😓😨😥 That will slow the development of treatments for a future pandemic, when every week without a vaccine can lead to thousands of additional deaths.

3. Eliminating future cures:  In addition to cutting mRNA funding, the administration has sharply cut medical research funding. Mr. Trump and his aides have justified these cuts by citing government efficiency and the “wokeness” of the universities that conduct much of the research. But science funding represents just 0.6 percent of federal spending, and most medical researchers have little to do with the wokeness wars. Their goal is to find effective treatments.

Without federal funding, much of this research — into cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, addiction, diabetes and more — will not happen. It involves basic science that tends to be unprofitable for any one company but can have enormous returns for society. In all, basic research may lose one-third of its federal funding.

Consider the work that a team of researchers at the University of Mississippi and Ohio State University is doing into glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer that is usually deadly within 18 months of diagnosis. The Trump administration cut the team’s funding without a good explanation, forcing the project to pause. After the funding was cut, Eden Tanner, a chemist on the project, received a flood of emails from people affected by the disease. “It’s really heartbreaking to tell them,” she said.

4. Dirtying the air and water:  One public-health success story of the past half-century has been the sharp reduction of air and water pollution. As a result of regulations and clean energy breakthroughs, we breathe and drink many fewer toxins than Americans did decades ago. Pollution-related illnesses, like severe asthma, have declined as a result.

This trend may now be over. The Trump administration is hollowing out the Environmental Protection Agency, rolling back regulations, withdrawing support for clean energy and promoting dirty energy that causes illnesses. One example: The administration has given hundreds of industrial facilities a two-year pass on pollution rules. Another example: The J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in West Olive, Michigan, was on the verge of closing until the Trump administration issued an emergency order, forcing it to stay open — even though the power company had not asked to keep it open. The plant continues to operate today, producing fine particle pollution that is associated with cardiac problems, asthma and other lung diseases.

The effects will be largest in red states, which tend to have more industrial facilities and lighter regulation. In Texas, coal plants are now allowed to release more than twice as much wastewater pollution as they were at the beginning of this year, as well as more than five times as much sulfur dioxide and more than six times as much carbon dioxide, according to the Sierra Club. These changes are also likely to aggravate climate change.
5. Taking away medical care

Trump’s recently passed domestic policy law will leave 10 million Americans without health insurance, experts estimate. Another 4.2 million could lose health insurance if Republicans in Congress refuse to extend expanded tax credits under the Affordable Care Act. Together, these changes would undo about one-third of the coverage gains from that law.

Without health insurance, millions of Americans will not be able to get crucial medical care. A large recent study concluded that poor adults who received Medicaid were 21 percent less likely to die than those who were not enrolled. People with insurance are also more likely to be healthy enough to lead happy, productive lives than people without it. Among the biggest victims of the Medicaid cuts, as we recently explained, will be people addicted to opioids — a group Mr. Trump repeatedly promised to help.

The Medicaid cuts exist largely to finance tax cuts for affluent Americans. That same recent law also includes cuts to food stamps, which will leave poor Americans less able to feed their families and almost certainly less healthy. Wealthy Americans who do not need the money nonetheless receive more of it, while lower-income Americans lose food stamps and health coverage.

In each of these areas, it is easy to name ways that our health system has failed many Americans over the past few decades. Insurance is too expensive. Pollution is concentrated in lower-income communities. Cutting-edge medical treatments are sometimes available only to the affluent. Preventive care and chronic diseases receive too little attention from insurers, doctors, scientific researchers and government agencies. Ultraprocessed foods and “overmedicalization” have hurt children, as RFKjr (Kennedy) has noted.

All of which shows the need for a true Make America Healthy Again movement. Trump is not leading that movement, though. He is instead taking the country backward to a time when many health threats were much more ominous than they are today. Trump is surrendering America to curable diseases.

Donald Trump is the worst president ever rated last by a 2024 survey of American historians

Shame and disgrace: Echo opinion letter published in the Longview News-Journal, a Texas newspaper:

Dear Editor:  It’s a matter of public record that former President Donald Trump was the most corrupt and the most incompetent U.S. president in history. A survey of American historians in the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project rated Abraham Lincoln at No. 1, the best president in our 235-year history, and they rated Trump at No. 45, the worst.

Trump’s bungled handling of the worst global pandemic in 100 years caused the unnecessary deaths of over 200,000 Americans. Now we have learned that Trump sent scarce COVID testing equipment to Russian war criminal Vladimir Putin, while good Americans died in hospitals without their loved ones by their sides, as refrigerator trucks waited on American streets to carry off the dead.

Trump watched on White House TV as common criminals and traitors ransacked the U.S. Capitol and criminally assaulted Capitol police on January 6, 2021, a date that will tragically live in infamy.

Trump’s undermining of NATO, the greatest strategic partnership in U.S. history, puts American military personnel at great risk and threatens our national security.

Trump’s dereliction of duty in these instances brings shame😳😡😒  and disgrace to the once-proud political party that for so long marketed itself as the “party of Lincoln.”

— From John Simmons, in Longview, Texas

Donald Trump selects his cast of loyalty bonded clowns for a cabinet focused on retribution priorities

Echo essay published in The New Yorker by David Remnick:

In the first few days after the reëlection of Donald Trump, one heard across the fruited plains and the canyons of the great cities a noisy welter of accusation, self-laceration, celebration, and rationalization.

 

There were also conspicuous assurances of normalcy that went like this: The sun went down in the evening and came up in the morning. Democracy did not end or even falter; the election was democracy, after all. The once and future President would surely dispense with his frenzied campaign threats and get down to the mundane task of governing. Making America great yet again required sobriety and competence, and Trump and his councillors would undoubtedly recognize that obligation.

For the titans of business, the new Administration promised untold prosperity: regulation would ease, tax rates decline. 

Elon Musk would make government just as civil, generous, and “efficient” as his social-media platform, X. Jeff Bezos, having ordered the editorial board of his newspaper to spike its endorsement of Kamala Harris, selflessly tweeted “big congratulations” to Trump, on his “extraordinary political comeback.” 

Wall Street executives and Sand Hill Road philosophers exulted that the “mergers-and-acquisitions climate” would now bring opportunities beyond imagining. (How these opportunities might benefit the working class they presumably would clarify at a later date.)

Meanwhile, the President-elect convened his loyalists at Mar-a-Lago, where they went about putting together a White House staff and a Cabinet. Historically, this is a deliberative process that can, even with the noblest intentions, go horribly wrong. In “The Best and the Brightest,” David Halberstam wrote about an American tradition of mandarins in Washington as an aristocracy come to power, convinced of its own disinterested quality, believing itself above both petty partisan interest and material greed. 

But, the suggestion also meant the holding and wielding of power was judged offensive by these same people, who preferred to view their role as service.

Halberstam’s larger subject was the aristocracy of Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and all the other exceptional men of the Ivy League and corporate boardrooms who helped guide the country into the (disasterous❗) Vietnam War.

At least as a matter of rhetoric, Trump is uninterested in conventional notions of expertise (which smacks of élitism). Nor is he focussed on assembling a council of constructive disagreement, a team of rivals (which smacks of disloyalty). 

As Trump's personnel choices rolled out in recent days, it became clear that they pointed wholly to his long-held priorities—and they are not the common good. The nominations of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, and Tulsi Gabbard as the director of National Intelligence are the residue of Trump’s resentments and his thirst for retribution.

In Gaetz, who faces allegations (which he denies) of illegal drug use and having sex with an underage girl, Trump sees himself, a man wrongly judged, he insists, as liable for sexual abuse. 

In Kennedy, an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, he sees a vindication of his own suspicion of science and his wildly erratic handling of the COVID crisis. In Hegseth, who defends war criminals and lambastes “woke” generals, he sees vengeance against the military establishmentarians who called him unfit. In Gabbard, who finds the good in foreign dictators, he sees someone who might shape the work of the intelligence agencies to help justify ending U.S. support for Ukraine. In other words, Trump’s nominations—in their reckless endorsement of the dangerously unqualified—look like the most flagrant act of vindictive trolling since the rise of the Internet. But it is a trolling beyond mischief. All these appointees are meant to bolster Trump’s effort to lay waste to the officials and the institutions that he has come to despise or regard as threats to his power or person. These appointees are not intended to be his advisers. They are his shock troops.

Or could it be that the President-elect is out to reduce the country to the status of a global laughingstock? Until this spate of appointments, observers had long remarked that Trump had no sense of humor. Al Franken, late of the U.S. Senate and “Saturday Night Live,” is among those who have said that they have never heard Trump laugh. Smirk, perhaps, at the misfortune of others, but not laugh in the joyful sense.

Back in the days when Trump swanned about Manhattan as a caricature rich guy and gonif construction magnate, he was part of a metropolitan jokescape, up there in lights with John Gotti and Leona Helmsley. Spy, the satirical magazine of its time, fact-checked his finances (inflated) and his books (preposterous). Trump was not amused. His lawyers sent frequent letters to the editors, threatening litigation. He found himself in a similar mood, many years later, when Barack Obama, who had suffered Trump’s constant insinuations about his place of birth, took the occasion of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner to rib the political aspirations of the host of “The Celebrity Apprentice.” Trump left the ballroom in a funk, nurturing, perhaps, an ominous resolve.

Trump has always been obsessed with dramas of dominance and submission, strength and weakness, who is laughing at whom. This is his lens for human relations generally, and particularly when it comes to politics, foreign and domestic. As long ago as January, 2016, Niraj Chokshi, then an enterprising reporter for the Washington Post, calculated the many times that Trump had pointed out that someone—Russia, China, OPEC, “the Persians,” “the mullahs”—was “laughing at us.” More recently, in this, his third Presidential campaign, Trump told a crowd at Mar-a-Lago, “November 5th is going to go down as the single most important day in the history of our country.” He added, “Right now, we’re not respected. Right now, our country is known as a joke. It’s a joke.”

Now Trump’s critics and an increasing number of his supporters are taking stock of his most disgraceful appointments—these men and women of perfect jawlines, dubious reputations, and rotten ideas. They wonder if this is not the ultimate joke, with national endangerment as its punch line. Dean Acheson, who helped Harry Truman design NATO and rebuild Europe under the Marshall Plan, titled his memoir “Present at the Creation.” Which of Donald Trump’s new advisers will line up to write the sequel? 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is incompetent and his dangerous HHS appointment will make America sick again

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department will make America sick again.😰

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Zeynep Tufekci

How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Could Destroy One of Civilization’s Best Achievements- our Public Health.

Even among the chaos generated by Donald Trump’s recent cabinet picks, one stands out for the extensive suffering and lasting institutional damage it may cause: his choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department.

Modern public health is one of civilization’s great achievements. In 1900, up to 30 percent of infants in some U.S. cities never made it to their first birthday. Since that time, vaccines, sanitation and effective medications have eliminated many previously commonplace illnesses and consigned others to extreme rarity. It’s easy to take much of that for granted, especially as those days have receded from living memory, but those achievements are fragile and can be lost.

The danger isn’t merely that Kennedy — who has almost no experience in government or large-scale administration, and who has shown a sometimes breathtakingly loose connection to the truth — would be incompetent or misleading. At the helm of a department with over 80,000 employees and a $3 trillion budget, one that oversees key agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, he would have control over the nation’s medicines, food safety, vaccines and medical research. With that power he could inflict significant harm to the public health system — and to the public trust that would be needed to rebuild it once he’s gone.

Kennedy has brought attention to some worthwhile public health concerns, such as the downsides of ultraprocessed foods and the value of exercise. But beyond those reasonable issues, he has filled the internet and the airwaves with views on vaccines, food safety, medicines and supplements that are a mix of grave misrepresentations and far-fetched conspiracies.

Outside of the medical community, few people still know about all the diseases whose safe and effective vaccines he is lying about, so let me remind you about one of them: diphtheria. Once known as “the strangling angel of children,” it causes its young victims to slowly and painfully suffocate, turn blue and gasp as a thick film fills their throat. They lie dying for many agonizing days. The disease has been all but wiped out, but in Spain a few years ago, it cost the life of an unvaccinated boy of 6. His distraught antivax parents promptly vaccinated their surviving child.

Kennedy doesn’t mention those gruesome realities. The core of his method is to mislead and confuse with selective citations that overlook key, even overwhelming evidence. He has falsely suggested that AIDS isn’t caused by H.I.V. With no evidence, he once mused that Covid was deliberately made to target Black and Caucasian people, while ensuring that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” When he was called out for trafficking in racist, antisemitic tropes, he walked the claim back, but only a little.

And throughout it all, he has pursued a course of relentless self-promotion, the consequences be damned. After an incorrect preparation of the M.M.R. vaccine killed two infants in Samoa, Kennedy jumped on the tragedy, spreading misleading information about it on social media.

Over the previous year, vaccination rates on the island had plummeted to less than 30 percent, a decline that has been attributed to vocal antivaccine groups. By the next year, a measles outbreak resulted in about 5,700 cases and more than 80 deaths, mostly among children under 5. It was then that Kennedy traveled to Samoa to meet with some of those activists, after having loudly cast doubt on the M.M.R. vaccine’s efficacy. The outbreak was halted only after the government declared a curfew, with desperate parents instructed to fly a red flag in front of their homes to alert mobile vaccine crews that their children needed shots.

As the head of Health and Human Services, a position that has, as one former secretary, Alex Azar, put it, “a shocking amount of power by the stroke of a pen,” Kennedy could go far beyond making false claims. For example, he could attempt to stop N.I.H. research on infectious diseases, as he recently vowed to do, or take actions that would make vaccines less available and lower their uptake.

And the victims wouldn’t just be children in families that consciously opt out. Many vaccines aren’t available for any children before the age of 6 months, and it takes years to complete the full schedule to get robust protection. That means infants and young kids are extremely vulnerable, as are immunocompromised people, cancer patients and the elderly. 

Globally, childhood vaccination rates have already stalled, and any further decline could mean outbreaks start happening much more widely.

All of that is bad enough under the best of times. But what if another pandemic rolls around? Here’s what Kennedy has to say about Covid vaccines, the greatest achievement of Trump’s first term: The “powerful vaccine cartel,” which he described as being led by Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates, worked “to prolong the pandemic and amplify its mortal effects” and “led an effort to deliberately derail America’s access to lifesaving drugs and medicines” such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine in favor of their nefarious vaccine project. In fact, both those medications were subjected to rigorous research, and proved to be ineffective against Covid.

If pandemics sound like yesterday’s news, the H5N1 outbreak among the nation’s dairy cattle continues to rage, as does the avian flu version ravaging birds everywhere. And there are strong signs that many human infections are going undetected.

Yet, Kennedy has been a vigorous proponent of raw milk, which unlike pasteurized milk has been shown to carry extremely high levels of the virus.

As for the legitimate public health issues that many people feel grateful to him for shining a light on, Republican senators could surely reject Kennedy and pressure Trump to find someone else to raise those issues, someone who won’t take a wrecking ball to the precious public health system that protects the nation’s children. Besides, someone who doesn’t respect scientific evidence and can’t tell quackery from credible suspicion isn’t likely to be that much help on those topics.

The COVID pandemic left a lot of people outraged, and some of their anger is justified. The tendency of many Democrats and some public health authorities to circle the wagons and issue blanket denials made things only worse.

We still need a fair reckoning of what went right and what very much did not. But it hasn’t come. Instead, public anger has been stoked, misdirected and exploited by those who seem less interested in solutions than in burning it all down.

Some Republican senators may be tempted to approve Kennedy’s nomination simply because they, too, are angry, or think that some agencies are overdue for a good shake-up.

That would be a grave mistake.

Grieving the DonOLD Trump election

We Can Fight Later. But, now is the time to mourn

Echo editoral opinion published by Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. 

When Donald Trump won the first time, I spoke to a journalist friend in Turkey to commiserate. 

At the time, I told her about all the protests that were planned, and she gently tried to prepare me for disappointment.

She and her friends had protested Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he was prime minister, she said. But in time, the protests subsided, and life within a country of diminishing freedoms ground on. This conversation stayed in my mind throughout the Trump presidency as a warning against letting down our guard. When Trump was finally ejected from the White House, I felt patriotic pride in the endurance of the anti-Trump resistance, which had never for a moment accepted his authoritarian grotesquerie as our new normal.

It won’t be that way this time. Trump’s first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but also quite likely the popular vote. The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.

So I expect the next few months to be a period of mourning rather than defiance. My own instinct — which conflicts with the demands of my job — is to retreat into my family, to look for solace in time with friends, in theater and in novels, to block out the humiliating truth about what my country has decided to become. 

On Wednesday morning I returned to an essay from The New York Review of Books published in 2019, about the Russian term “vnutrennaya emigratsia,” or internal emigration, a deliberate embrace of one’s own alienation. 

“For many Russian authors and artists for centuries, the idea of ‘turning inward’ and living oblivious of the political concerns of the moment has been a vital skill and even an art form,” wrote Viv Groskop. It’s a skill, I suspect, that many of us will at least temporarily try to cultivate to avoid going completely insane.

But, eventually, mourning either starts to fade or curdles into depression and despair. When and if it does, whatever resistance emerges to the new MAGA will differ from what came before.

Gone will be the hope of vindicating the country from Trumpism, of rendering him an aberration. What’s left is the more modest work of trying to ameliorate the suffering his government is going to visit on us. There’s no point in protesting his inauguration, as millions did in 2017. But hopefully we will take to the streets if his forces come into our neighborhoods to drag migrant families away. We will need to strengthen the networks that help women in red states get abortions, especially if Trump’s Justice Department cracks down on the mailing of abortion pills or his F.D.A. withdraws approval of them. In state and local elections, I’ll want to know how candidates promise to protect us from the MAGA movement’s threats to reshape our public health systems and our schools.

In the longer term, we’ll need liberal politics that are about more than just fending off the right. Trump, after all, is a particularly ghastly manifestation of historical forces that are reshaping politics all over the Western world, elevating nationalist leaders such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and powering the growth of parties like the right-wing Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally. You can blame Kamala Harris for spending too much time courting moderate Republican women, or for the vagueness of her “opportunity economy” rhetoric. But few politicians anywhere have figured out how to hold together a coalition that includes both affluent, educated, cosmopolitan elites and blue-collar voters who prize tradition and social stability. Maybe doing so is no longer possible, but at the very least, it will require a plausible vision of what a thriving progressive society looks like.

Ultimately, Trump’s one consistent feature is his incompetence. 

If history is any guide, many of those incompetencies he brings into government will come to despise him. Trump will not give people the economic relief they’re craving. If he follows through on his plans for universal tariffs, economists expect higher inflation. Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, dreaming of imposing aggressive austerity on the federal government, has said that Americans will have to endure “some temporary hardship.” We saw, with the COVID pandemic, how Trump handled a major crisis, and there is not the slightest reason to believe he will perform any better in handling another. I have little doubt that many of those who voted for him will come to regret it. He could even end up discrediting bombastic right-wing nationalism the way George W. Bush — whose re-election also broke my heart — discredited neoconservatism.

The question, if and when that happens, is how much of our system will still be standing, and whether Trump’s opponents have built an alternative that can restore to people a sense of dignity and optimism. That will be the work of the next four years — saving what we can ad trying to imagine a tolerable future. For now, though, all I can do is grieve. 

"Dump Trump" - Donald Trump is a con man and convicted felon who will make America dangerous again!

Echo opinion letter: Don't elect Donald Trump published in Carteret County News-Times in Morehead City, North Carolina:

I have to wonder what perceived reality writers have been living in for the last eight years when they profess such ardent love and unfettered support for the convicted felon and lifelong con man Donald Trump.

It seems to me that the overwhelming majority of lies generated during the Trump presidency emanated not from the Democratic party, but from the mouth of ... Donald Trump. 

By some accounts the lie & fabrication tally for Trump's four years in office exceeded 30,000 - the man seems incapable of saying anything truthful except when under oath in a court of law.

As for Democrats not improving the lives of Americans, both conservative and liberal sources have identified many times over that Republican administrations run up the deficit (as did Trump's) and cater to billionaires and corporations (as did Trump's) while stiffing the average American and tanking the economy before leaving office and blaming the Democrats for the predicament they created (as did Trump).

Then come the Democratic presidencies (Clinton, Obama, and now Biden in the last 30 years) to clean up the mess and get the economy back on its feet and start doing things that actually benefit families with household incomes below the $400,000 mark that some conservative pundits consider "middle class". That's rich in my book, in both senses of the word.

Trumpziism is dangerous!

The American Rescue Act helped get Americans through the COVID pandemic without going hungry or bankrupt, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law put $1 trillion towards actually improving our nation's infrastructure - something Donald Trump lied about doing regularly and never made any effort to improve. The CHIPS and Science Act that has made investing in technology and production within our borders a priority for the first time in over a generation - did Donald Trump show any interest in doing that?

And then there is the Inflation Reduction Act which also provided healthcare reforms (think insulin capped at $35/month and $2000 out of pocket prescription caps for Medicare beneficiaries) while setting our economy on track to bring inflation back under control. Donald Trump didn't make any of that happen - he didn't even try!

The Bipartisan Border Security Bill co-sponsored by Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma earlier this year would have been the first meaningful border legislation in decades, ending "catch and release" and strengthening our border control but was scuttled by ... Donald Trump. Now why would the Republican nominee who bellowed endlessly about building a wall (that Mexico would pay for - how'd that one work out?) not want GOP legislators to strengthen our border protection? It does make you wonder, or at least it should.

And by any cogent evaluation it is the Radical Right Republicans who have taken over their political party, pushing a fascist extremist agenda that will be the ruin of this country if allowed to succeed. Their candidate is the most crooked politician this country has ever known - he has the most tawdry personal history as well as the public felony indictments and convictions to prove it.

The stock market indexes are higher than they ever were under Trump. Unemployment is lower than it ever was under Trump. The US produces and exports more energy than it ever did under Trump. The United States economy has recovered further and faster following COVID than any other developed nation on earth - under Joe Biden, not under Donald Trump.

We have seen corrupt capitalism and economic collapse under Donald Trump, and we have seen recovery, growth, and the restoration of America's standing on the world stage under Joe Biden. Leadership is facing tough times and making the correct decisions to pull the nation forward. Don't elect Donald Trump and enable him to pull us backward into the "American carnage" that he and the Radical Right GOP believe would somehow make America great.  

From John Rickabaugh in Newport North Carolina

Maine Governor Janet Mills takes second term oath and inaugural speech

Governor Janet T. Mills Second Inaugural Address Augusta Civic Center Wednesday, January 4, 2023.

Echo report on Maine Public:

Governor Janet Mills takes the oath of office administered by Senator Troy Jackson

Thank you. Mr. President, (Senator Troy Jackson) Madam Secretary of State, Madam Speaker, Madam Chief Justice, (I like the sound of this), members of the 131st Maine Legislature, members of the Cabinet, Rabbi Asch, Bishop Brown, distinguished guests — It is a profound honor and a privilege to take the oath prescribed by the Constitution and to assume again the mantle of Governor of the great State of Maine. I am deeply humbled by the trust the people of Maine have placed in me. President John F. Kennedy said, “If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.” I agree. And so I want to thank our own poet laureate Julia Bouwsma and Bethel resident and Presidential Inaugural poet Richard Blanco – and Maine’s poet-musician Dave Mallett – for their very inspiring words. 

Thank you also to the Franklin County Fiddlers and the incredible Pihcintu Multinational Girls Choir, including my young friends Shy and Natasha who graced this same stage with their presence four years ago — Welcome back! 

You are more beautiful than ever! 

I also draw your attention to the empty chair in the military section to honor and recognize all Maine service members who have lost their lives in service to our country. I would not be standing here today if it were not for my family: my brothers Peter, Paul and David, my sister Dora, my five daughters and five grandchildren, and my husband Stan, gone eight years now, who arose every morning happily proclaiming, “the best is yet to come!” 

Traversing this state many times over many months, I have learned more about the character of our people and the worth of our communities, what we give, what we take, what we offer to each other. 

I toured clinics and hospitals, large and small, schools, warehouses, stores, diners and boathouses, log yards, libraries and factories, houses of worship of all faiths. And I can report: – From the Can Am at America’s First Mile to Maine’s first town, 375-year old Kittery, – From Friar’s Brewpub in Bucksport to Bangs Mussels in Portland, – From Robbins Lumber in Searsmont to Louisiana Pacific in Houlton, – From Geiger Brothers in Lewiston to New Balance, Sappi, and Maine Grains in Somerset County, – From the lakes and slopes of western Maine, 2 – To the University of New England, Athena Health, Jackson and Bigelow Labs, The Ferland Center in Orono and the Roux Institute in Portland – Great things are happening all over Maine! And I can report to you as well that, across this Maine – this one Maine – hope is very much alive. Over the last few years, there was something that caught our attention especially during the pandemic – these large luminous, neon-like signs, began popping up in cities across Maine. “Hopeful,” they read in colorful, cursive script. These signs became a symbol not only of survival but of health, renewal, new life. The sign’s creator, Charlie Hewitt, said, “To be hopeful is not a gift – it’s a challenge. 

To be hopeful requires action…commitment…opening your eyes, it requires making a decision…being part of something.” Maine people know and embrace this. Indeed, we experienced it these last four years. Tonight, like Charlie Hewitt’s art deco signs, a flashback to previous decades, the James Webb Telescope is taking us back through time and into the bowels of celestial history, like a magical mystery tour of the universe, drawing us both inward and outward through space and time, and unlocking mysteries of the past and foreshadowings of the future. I can’t help but wonder: if our forebears a century ago had had a Webb Telescope to view the world down through time, what might they think of where we are today? Would they have ever imagined that the log drives would come to an end? That the Narrow Gauge railway would turn into a quiet foot path? That our granite quarries would be rendered obsolete by the invention of concrete? Could they have foreseen cell phones and flat screen TVs and computers of any size with words that are written and then disappear on a virtual page as though they had never once become thought? We do know one thing our forebearers were thinking about. 

Exactly one hundred years ago, Dora Bradbury Pinkham of Fort Kent, Maine, became the first woman to serve in this Legislature. Arthur G. Staples of the Lewiston Evening Journal wrote at the time, “it may happen that, in after years, perhaps 2023, some woman Governor of Maine, and some legislature largely composed of women, may desire to know how the first woman legislator carried herself.” “So!” he went on, “In the year 2023, one hundred years hence, Dora Pinkham is thus presented to you….Maine is ready for her sisters.” Well, Arthur Stapes, here we are! I hope Dora Pinkham would be pleased to know that today half our congressional delegation are women; that a black woman from Portland is our Speaker of the House and that a woman whose own roots lie deep in Pinkham’s beloved County, has now taken the oath for the second time to serve as Governor of the state. 3 Today, a century after Dora Pinkham took the oath, our rivers no longer carry logs to sawmills. Our food comes in slick packages from around the globe. And we meet with distant friends and coworkers on a screen the size of a writing pad. But what about our descendants, those generations yet to come – what might the telescope of the future reveal to them about who we are now and where we are going? Will it be good? Will they be proud of us? Will the people of the future see how we fought disease, homelessness, crippling opioid use and a fear of those who are different from us? Will they appreciate that, for their sake and ours, we began to rid our farms and waters of the forever chemicals known as “PFAS”? 

Will they see how we promoted health and education; celebrated arts and literature; preserved our precious right to vote and conducted free and fair elections? How we adjusted to technology and innovation? How we adapted and evolved through tumultuous times, exploring new sources of energy, electricity, new modes of communication and travel? I hope so. But perhaps they will ask other probing questions as well, like: “What was daylight savings time all about?” “Who the heck was Elon Musk?!” And “what on earth was ‘Twitter?’” And “What were all those tall gray structures that held something called ‘an office?’” And maybe they will also ask: “What took them so long to shelter the unhoused? “Why did it take years to build a house when we can 3-D print a single home in just an hour?” “Why,” they may ask, “did they wrap everything in packaging, material they could have re-used, and why did they dump waste in the ocean and bury it in the earth?” “What were all those parking lots and those tarred roads crisscrossing the countryside?” they will ask. “And the gasses emitted from structures and vehicles that clogged the air, warmed the planet, and melted the ancient glaciers?” “Why did the scourge of a drug epidemic rob them of so many precious lives? “Why didn’t they have safe and loving places to care for all their children?” “Why did they pay so much every time they went to a doctor or a pharmacist?” 4 These questions, my friends, may be asked in the future – but the answers will be shaped by our actions in the coming months and years. Four years ago I stood before you and promised to work for a healthier, more vibrant, more welcoming state. Who could have known, one thousand four hundred sixty three days ago, that this state, this nation, and countries across the globe, would face a deadly pandemic reminiscent of the Spanish Flu one hundred years before, one that would threaten the safety of every community, business, family and person, one that would challenge us to reinvent how we learn, work, play, travel and communicate safely, a phenomenon that would test the very core of our character? It was during that time that I heard from thousands of you – emails, cards, letters, notes from people sharing their thoughts and their fears…. including ones from children, like 10-year old Savannah, who wrote, “Dear Governor Mills, I hope this COVID doesn’t affect our hearts being isolated from one another.” Well, Savannah, we learned that neither a worldwide pandemic, nor any other thing will ever isolate our hearts from one another. For we are a caring people. We in Maine are family. And we have found such strength within ourselves we didn’t know we had, even, as Dave Mallett puts it, “with our backs against the wall.” And we have come through that horrific time better than nearly every other state in the nation. With the good people of our Cabinet, with the brilliant leadership of Commissioner Jeanne Lambrew and CDC Director Nirav Shah and others, we answered the call. Now, experts nationally say that both our public health response and our economic recovery have been among the best in the country. Four years ago I committed my new administration to taking us into the future, to welcoming new people to our state and welcoming back those who have left. So, I am pleased to report, after the decades’ long exodus of young people from our state, Maine now boasts the 7th highest in-migration rate in the country. We are welcoming new people every day. And we continue to listen to the people of Maine. You said you wanted a government that paid teachers better, that funded public schools, schools where children learned on full stomachs, a government that made the dream of higher education attainable for more people. And so we fully funded the state’s share of public education for the first time in history. We funded universal free meals in the public schools. We’ve provided free community college to recent high 5 school grads and we enacted one of the most generous student loan forgiveness programs in the country. You said you wanted health insurance for more people, so we expanded MaineCare to more than 100,000 people, as the voters told us to do. We have reduced the uninsured rate by more than any state in the country. And we listened to small businesses drowning in health insurance costs and lowered their premiums for the first time in decades. You asked us to pay attention to what the United Nations scientists have called a “Code Red for Humanity” and the violent storms across the nation damaging homes, towns, fisheries, wildlife, everything our nation holds dear. So, with renewable energy, weatherization, efficiency, alternative heating sources, and a focus on resiliency, we have put Maine on a path towards carbon neutrality, with a plan to protect our precious farms, shorelands and towns from the ravages of climate change. You asked us to expand broadband, recognizing that it is the communications highway of the future and that high speed Internet is as necessary to everything we do as water is to life. So, we created the Maine Connectivity Authority. We’ve connected more than 48,000 households to the Internet, and I’ve pledged that by the end of 2024 every person in Maine who wants a good Internet connection will have one. You asked us to begin to repair the divisions between the State and Tribal Nations. And so we enacted the highest water quality standards in the nation for rivers with sustenance fishing; we expanded tribal court prosecutions of domestic violence; and we negotiated major new revenue sources for the tribes. You urged us to protect reproductive health care against the threat, now real, that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade. And we did so, passing laws that discouraged protestors from blocking health clinics, that required public and private insurance coverage of abortion services and that made those services available to women in rural as well as urban areas of the state. You asked us to preserve some of the very special places of our state. And so, without borrowing, we reinvigorated the Land for Maine’s Future program and acquired thousands of acres of working waterfront, farmland and wildlife habitat for generations to enjoy a hundred years hence. You asked us to fight against federal rulings that threatened our iconic lobster industry. And we did just that — working with our Members of Congress, securing a regulatory pause as well as funding for new research to protect both the Right Whale and the lobster industry. You asked us to manage our budgets prudently. So State government has lived within its means and built up the Rainy Day Fund to a record high to shelter us from the impacts of inflation and a possible recession. And we have continued to fix our highways and bridges – worn by time, use, and Maine’s changing seasons – without borrowing. But our job is far from finished. 6 Today a workforce shortage undermines our very ability to get things done – from teaching, policing, healthcare, farming, to selling and manufacturing goods. “Help Wanted” signs are everywhere. And so we are expanding workforce training in high schools and community colleges. We are making more child care available for working parents. And we are partnering with towns and businesses to find better housing for workers and shelter for the unhoused. And we are putting people to work. You are asking us to strengthen and diversify our economy, recognizing that we are too dependent on other states and nations and too vulnerable to the volatile winds of worldwide geopolitics. So we are investing in our fisheries, farms and forest products to produce more at home, seizing on our spirit of independence and self-reliance, while seeking new markets abroad. You are asking us to diversify our energy sources and loosen the stranglehold fossil fuel companies have on the wallets of Maine families and businesses. So we are pursuing renewable sources of energy that will protect both our environment and your family’s bottom-line, instead of big oil’s profits. You are asking us to address the crisis in housing. So we issued the senior affordable housing bonds first thing. Then we enacted the largest investment in housing in state history. We renewed the historic rehabilitation tax credit. And we have funded more than 1,500 new residential units and are adding hundreds more in the years ahead. We are working every day with cities and towns and developers to stand up emergency shelters and workforce housing in a way that fits the needs of every town. You are asking us to do our best to stop the ravages of opioid addiction and the waste of human life and aspirations from drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine. And so we are, in earnest, providing treatment beds and recovery and prevention measures, and distributing Naloxone everywhere to save thousands of lives. And we will make sure that every school and community has an effective prevention program to stop the scourge of addiction before it begins. You are asking us to make sure that every child is safe, acknowledging that these drugs that are killing adults are endangering children too. We reactivated the Children’s Cabinet, long dormant. We put more child protection workers on the street. And we’re adding resources for foster families in order to keep our children safe. But that work is never over. We cannot and shall not rest until we eradicate the scourge of child abuse and neglect, drug overdose and domestic violence – acts, injuries and deaths that tear at the very fabric of a society. You are asking us to recognize that children’s emotional health too suffered during the pandemic and that hospital emergency rooms and jails are not the right places to treat someone in a mental health crisis. 7 So we have opened Maine’s first comprehensive crisis receiving center. We are investing in residential care and community-based treatment. We are training more professionals and expanding mental health crisis services statewide. Ladies and gentlemen, over the next four years it will be our challenge to address these issues head-on, to continue the march of progress we began four years ago, and to be prepared for challenges not yet known to us. In doing so, we envision Maine as a place where quality healthcare is unquestioned; where good education, from pre-K through graduate school, is available and affordable; where good-paying jobs are offered in every corner of the state; where children are safe and secure in their homes; and where anyone can go online from any place in Maine to shop, attend a class, conduct business, get medical help or simply send a message to a friend. These are our goals – hopeful but real. That hope is built of the hardiness of a people who endure long winters and muddy springs, hot summers and windy falls. People who endure and survive and thrive above it all. Hope is not an easy thing. It’s not mere wishful thinking. It’s not just trying to do what we did yesterday in the same old, same old ways. Hope is disruptive. It is a four-letter word, after all. It challenges and changes the way we do things. It calls on us to advance and adapt, while preserving who we are as a people and all the values we hold dear. More than ever before, because of everything we have been through and because of everything we are, hope resides right here in Maine. Hope is manifest in the actions you took this very day, actions inspired perhaps by one of humanity’s great spiritual guides who said 2,000 years ago, saying: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you took me in, naked and you clothed me….”. For your actions today in housing, heating and helping those in need, the people of Maine are deeply grateful. You, the Maine Legislature, have provided hope. Hope is about finding new and innovative ways to solve our problems, using the ingenuity and courage we rediscovered within ourselves these last few years. And I see hope all across this state today: — There is hope in the work of University of Maine students devising new uses for wood, and ways to harness the power of the raw winds of the Atlantic, and methods to build homes with biobased materials from a giant printer; 8 — There is hope in the aspirations of innovators at the Roux Institute, using artificial intelligence and data analytics to solve complex problems; — Hope in cities like Waterville, Biddeford and Westbrook, evolving from their industrial past, reinventing their downtowns and attracting new families and businesses every day; — Hope in the faces of the women shopkeepers in Lewiston and Portland who are selling fabrics, foods and spices from other countries, these industrious mothers of soccer champions, daughters of another continent; — Hope in the vision of enterprising artists, poets, musicians, architects, writers and makers of crafts in every corner of this state; — Hope in the far reaches of the County, Downeast, and in the shadows of our western mountains where farmers, foresters, fishermen, hunters, storekeepers, and tourists co-exist; — There is hope too in the eyes of those who have forded raging rivers, thick forests, steep mountains and rough seas to seek refuge and work in our country and in our state. There is hope for the future, just as it was hope that saw us through troubled times in the past. The charge, the responsibility we take up today is to choose action over acquiescence and apathy, to make decisions grounded in experience with an eye to the future, and always to be a part of something larger than ourselves. 

So, on this solemn occasion, let us recommit to working together and acknowledging: - that healthcare is a human right and we will fight to preserve it; - that education is essential and we will provide it; - that climate change is real and we will combat it; - that a decent home is essential and we will build it. And when the people of the future look back on us through their own James Webb Telescope – they will see that we worked together, during difficult times and good, that we settled our differences with civility, commonsense and compassion, that we took care of one another, that we protected the air, water and land around us, and we built a state that survived and thrived long into the future. And perhaps they too will see those things I believe will never change: – the way the surf of the mighty Atlantic pounds the granite shores of our state; – the way Katahdin rises up in all its majesty in the western sky; – the way the Basilica in Lewiston inspires the people of the mighty Androscoggin; 9 – the way so many institutions of higher learning enrich and grace our towns and cities across the state; – the way Moxie tickles the throat as it goes down and the way the wild blueberry finds a place in every tasty meal. One hundred years from now, people not yet born will turn a telescope back in time and find in the Maine of the 2020s a place where government did everything it could to save the lives and livelihoods of its people; took nothing for granted but invested wisely to make Maine a clean, healthy and welcoming place where success is attainable. And they will remember one sign, one word, that guided our path, our actions and our dreams: “Hopeful.” It is the highest privilege of my life to serve as your Governor, during hard times and good, stormy seas and calmer waters, as we weather the best and the worst of times together, tackling extraordinary problems, through extraordinary times, alongside you, the extraordinary people of Maine.

It is an honor to lead a people where everything good is possible and where we believe always, deep in our hearts, ‘the best is yet to come!’ Thank you. ###

Vaccinated patients earned the right to priority hospital admissions

Echo opinion letter published in The Washington Post:

The Jan. 3, 2022, Washington Post Metro article “Hogan: ‘Worst’ to come on covid” noted that hospitals have insufficient capacity to deal with the coronavirus surge.

Currently, there are few or no hospital beds available in Montgomery County, so patients are being treated in the emergency room halls.

Hospitals should be required to be transparent about the criteria they use to decide who gets a hospital bed. One of those criteria should be that vaccinated patients waiting for a bed (whether for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, or other related medical conditions) should get higher priority for a bed than an unvaccinated patient ill with COVID. 

As noted in the Jan. 3, editorial “Payouts for vaccine refusers,” unvaccinated patients must face the consequences of their decision. One of those consequences should be lower priority to get hospital beds.

From Douglas Soffer, Arlington, Virginia

Vaccinations are a precious gift to support life against preventable disease

Echo opinion letter published in the Herald & Review newspaper in Decatur, Illinois.

The Vaccination Solution!

"Freedom isn't free."

This saying is often invoked on occasions honoring those who serve in our military, but it is just as true about most civic behavior.

Every law places some limits on freedom. But if there is to be a measure of liberty for all, each individual must give up some measure of his/her liberty. "My freedom to swing my arms ends, where your nose begins."

The legality of mandatory public health measures such as quarantine and vaccination is well established in our country. E.g., in 1906 the Supreme Court upheld mandated vaccination in a case concerning a Massachusetts pastor who challenged his state's mandate of smallpox vaccination.

The Court noted that the Constitution does not always allow Americans to behave as they choose.  

To quote Justice Harlan in that case, "Real liberty for all could not exist regardless of injury that may be done to others."

A vaccination is not a personal sacrifice, so much as a precious gift that confers a measure of freedom from threat of a deadly disease. In present case, the disease has killed 700,000 in our country alone and millions worldwide.

The safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccines has been verified by scientific research of a kind we ordinary folk are not qualified to do for ourselves. But anyone may follow statistics on the spread of the pandemic, and see that it wanes where people accept vaccinations, and surges in places where they refuse. 

That is a matter of fact, not of personal opinion!

There is no "medical freedom" to risk infecting others with a deadly disease. Rather, there is a civic duty we have to each other: to be, not part of the problem, but part of the solution; to do our part toward curbing the spread of COVID-19 by following the mandates.

From Peggy Brayfield, Charleston, Illinois

Unexplained and unsupported American protective (PPE) mask aversion

Querdenker (essentially “against-the-grain thinkers”).

My family has lived and traveled in Asia, especially when my husband was in the US Navy and stationed in Subic Bay, Philippines. From my experience, wearing protective masks in Asia is widely accepted. In fact, it is common to see children wearing masks.

This New York Times opinion echo describes how mask aversion seems to be an America anomaly - i.e. departure from the normal or common order, in Germany.

A world view about wearing masks.

Opinion echo by Alec MacGillis published in The New York Times.

BERLIN — You see it everywhere here in Germany, day in and day out: People taking the subway or bus or train put masks on as they prepare to board. And when they arrive at their stop or station and disembark, nearly all of them take the mask off, almost in unison.

For someone who arrived here after spending the first year and a quarter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, it is a remarkable sight: a communal, matter-of-fact approach to mitigation, turning what has become such an intensely charged symbol for Americans into a mere practicality.

This approach to masks and public transit is on display not only in cosmopolitan Berlin, but everywhere I’ve been in my reporting travels these past two months: I witnessed this effect in the eastern industrial city of Chemnitz, in the small western city of Erkelenz, and even in the rural eastern region of Lusatia, where the far-right Alternative for Germany Party, known here by its German initials as the AfD, had one of its strongest showings in the national elections last month. Mask on when you’re inside the train or store; mask off when you’re out of it.

Throughout 2020, and the first part of 2021, I traveled across the United States reporting stories, and wondered why it was so hard for the country to arrive at a sensible middle ground on COVID-19 measures.

Even after public health experts had established the vastly lower risk of transmission outdoors, I watched local officials close playgrounds and swimming pools, leaving young people with fewer options for low-risk activity and social contact. That was (mostly) the blue states. In one red town I attended a crowded memorial service in a windowless church where precious few people were wearing masks, and many shared embraces as though the virus simply didn’t exist. 

All or nothing, nothing or all.

And I saw how these wildly conflicting responses were fueling a vicious cycle of ever wider divides in behavior, with corrosive political side effects. For someone who had been documenting the country’s growing political fissures for more than a decade, it was not hard to discern what was happening: Reports of Trump supporters refusing to wear masks in big-box stores or indoor campaign events seemed to make liberals more inclined to wear masks even when outdoors with few people around; seeing mask wearing turned into a political statement, more partisan talisman than necessary tool, in turn made many conservatives less likely to mask up indoors when the circumstances justified it.

This was what Julia Marcus, a public-health researcher at Harvard Medical School, found when she interviewed mask skeptics last year: “They said they felt ridiculous wearing a mask when there are few people around, like outdoors or in a spacious store,” she wrote. “When I agreed that masking isn’t as important in certain settings, they became more amenable to wearing one when it matters most.” Overselling danger seemed, in other words, to have the opposite of the intended effect.

So it has been striking to be in a country where common-sense protocols generally prevail. It might be tempting to chalk up the uniformity of Germans’ behavior to their penchant for rule-following. This certainly helps explain why most Germans are observing requirements for masks on public transit or in stores, but it doesn’t really explain why — in contrast to what I witnessed in blue American cities — I have seen so few people going over and above the rules here, wearing masks outdoors or in other situations where they are not required.

And this tendency was reflected in the response to the coronavirus: The difference between the share of Germans on the ideological right and left who thought there should have been fewer restrictions on public activity was 20 percentage points, a Pew survey found early this summer. 

In the United States, the difference between right and left on that question was a whopping 45 points, by far the largest gap of any country surveyed by Pew.

This is not to say that Germany’s 83 million people are utterly free of disagreement on COVID. The rate of people with at least one vaccination shot — about 68 percent — is lower than that of many other European countries, barely ahead of the United States, and lower than that of many American cities with strict COVID requirements still in place. This is, in part, because Germany particularly lags on vaccinating teenagers, compared to other European Union members, but it is also a sign that the country has its share of dissenters. And there have been large protests against mask mandates, travel restrictions and the proliferating vaccine requirements for restaurants, sports events and other gatherings, a movement called Querdenker (essentially “against-the-grain thinkers”).

Notably, this movement has been more ideologically heterogeneous than equivalent protest groups in the United States, with some left-leaning vaccine skeptics and people upset about nightclub closings in the mix. (This diversity may partly reflect the role of the police in enforcing masking and other COVID rules — on several occasions, I’ve seen armed officers reminding transit riders on the platform to mask up — which can scramble the lines of resistance.)

To be sure, some of the anti-restriction rhetoric sounds similar to that in the United States — in Chemnitz, a supporter of the AfD who had come out to heckle the Green candidate for chancellor told me that “masks are humbug — they don’t help at all” and that mask mandates served no purpose other than keeping people scared. The very next day, the police in southwestern Germany arrested a 49-year-old man accused of fatally shooting a 20-year-old gas-station clerk who had told him to wear a mask in the shop. It was reportedly the country’s first instance of deadly violence apparently fueled by disputes over pandemic restrictions, a category of killing of which the United States has more than a half dozen examples.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are still some head-scratching restrictions here that challenge scientific guidance, such as the museums that have still disabled audio features on exhibits for fear of visitors touching the same headsets.

But German public health authorities seem to be making decisions with less concern than their American counterparts are about whether they will somehow abet right-wing narratives. For instance, requirements for proof of vaccination here in Germany can also be satisfied by showing that you’ve already had COVID, following the studies that have shown prior infection to provide strong protection. In the United States, public health officials seem to worry that anything validating anti-vaxxer claims about natural immunity will reduce vaccination rates. And education officials here speak much more freely about the downsides of masks in classrooms as they now start lifting school masking requirements.

The role of the media undoubtedly plays a role, as well — there are far, far fewer fear-stirring articles or segments in the national press or broadcast news here about, say, the potential risk that the coronavirus poses to children.

No, it seems to me that the likelier explanation for the less polarized approach to virus mitigation behavior is that Germany is, well, much less polarized. Politics are so consensus-driven here that for the past eight years Germany has had a governing coalition consisting of the two largest parties.

The overall effect is of an environment set at a lower temperature, far closer to normalcy, where the public space is not forever on the verge of flaring into a divisive battleground of signaling, judgments and resistance.

Meanwhile, the reports keep coming from what looks like an ever more inflamed landscape back home: incidents of resistance rage like the two people arrested at the Nashville airport in late August for refusing to wear masks on separate flights; officials in high-transmission areas barring mask mandates in schools while officials in low-transmission areas require schoolchildren (and college students) to wear masks even outdoors; a former Obama administration cabinet member comparing Americans opposed to mask requirements to the suicide bomber who killed about 170 Afghans and 13 American troops in Kabul. The middle ground seems more out of reach than ever.

One day during the just-concluded election season here, I went to see a Berlin campaign rally for Olaf Scholz, the chancellor candidate of the center-left Social Democrats and, it now appears, the likely successor to Angela Merkel. Mr. Scholz invoked the unity and sense of purpose that Germany had demonstrated during the pandemic as his model for bringing the country together to confront other challenges, such as climate change. “We saw in this corona crisis that we can hold together, that solidarity is possible in this country,” he said.

I couldn’t help thinking that the line seemed far more plausible here than if used in the United States.

A few weeks later, I went to a different campaign rally, for the far-right AfD in Lusatia. Hundreds of people gathered in a square in the small city of Görlitz to see the party’s two top national candidates. Nearby were gathered dozens of counterprotesters, with police officers on hand to keep the two groups separate.

None of the AfD supporters wore masks. Virtually all of the counterprotesters did, a rare incidence of outdoor mask wearing. Here, at last, in the most acute of political circumstances, was a stark COVID culture-war contrast.

It felt almost like home.

Alec MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, is the author of “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.”